Rehabbing the Fourth Amendment

In an unusual split, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on April 21 that police need to obtain a warrant before searching the vehicle of a person who has been arrested and locked in a police cruiser and thus poses no safety threat to officers. The court ruled that police may conduct a search incident to arrest without a warrant "only if it is reasonable to believe that the arrestee might access the vehicle at the time of the search or that the vehicle contains evidence of the offense of arrest."

In the case at issue (Ariz. v. Gant) police arrested Rodney Gant for driving with a suspended license. After Gant was handcuffed and put in the back of a locked cruiser, police searched his car and found a gun and a bag of cocaine in the pocket of a jacket left on the backseat. Gant challenged the search, arguing that because he was already secured, there was no reason for the warrantless search, and that there was no possibility police would find evidence related to the traffic offense for which he'd been arrested. (Asked at a pretrial hearing to explain the reason for the search, one officer told the court: "Because the law says we can do it.")

An unusual majority of the court -- including Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Antonin Scalia, David Souter and Clarence Thomas joining John Paul Stevens' opinion -- agreed that the search was unconstitutional. "Neither the possibility of access nor the likelihood of discovering offense-related evidence authorized the search in this case," Stevens wrote.